The Big Bang, it turns out, is for sissies

“…cosmologists have estimated that some of these galactic walls may have taken from 80 billion to 100 billion, to 150 billion years to form in a direct challenge to current age estimates of the age of the Universe following the Big Bang.” Here.

State of the human condition (cont.’)

Here and here.

Extremely super peripheral extrapolation (or astral vacationing in the Valley of Ennui)

“…All good things must come to an end, and that includes our Universe itself. It’s 13 billion years old, but what will happen in a trillion years? A quintillion?  That’s a seriously long time from now. By then, all stars will be long dead, and (if modern quantum theory is right, and we’re pretty sure it is) even black holes will have evaporated. Not only that, but matter itself will have fallen apart: protons, long thought to be utterly stable, may disintegrate after about 10 ^39 years. So in that long distant future, the Universe may be nothing more than an ultra-thin soup of electrons and low-energy photons bumping around an eternal nothingness…” Here. (Hey, cheer up, boobie, there may be endless universes–ask Steven Hawkins and friends).

_______________________________

Related (sort of): Ennui hits Chicago police force.

My pharmacist the witch doctor

Somebody showed me this in her new pharmacy textbook. It’s from the first main page of  Mosby’s Pharmacy Technician: Principles and Practice, in which a list of terms and definitions for the modern scientific pharmacist are given. Take special note of the last entry–shaman. Is that a term that should have a place  in a modern medical textbook?

Apothecary Latin term for pharmacist

Clinical pharmacist Pharmacis who monitors patient medications in inpatient and some retal settings

Dogma Code of beliefs based on tradition rather than fact

Inpatient pharmacy A pharmacy in a hospital or institutional setting

Outpatient pharmacy Community pharmacies or pharmacies in outpatient hospital settings

Pharmacist Person who dispenses drugs and counsels patients

Pharmacy clerk Person who assists the pharmacist at the front counter of the pharmacy; the person who accepts payment for medications

Pharmacy technician Person who assists pharmacist by filling prescriptions and performing other nondispensing tasks

Protocol Set of standards written by hospital or insurnace company for patient treatment

Shaman Medicine person who holds a high place of honor in a tribe

shaman /’amn/, /’em-/
noun (PL. shamans)
a person regarded as having access to, and influence in, the world of good and evil spirits, especially among some peoples of northern Asia and North America. Typically such people enter a trance state during a ritual, and practise divination and healing

Thesaurus: a medicine woman, healer; witch doctor…

____________________________________________________________________

BTW, here are some lyrics to sing while waiting for the shaman to fill your prescription:

I told the witch doctor
I was in love with you
I told the witch doctor
I was in love with you
And then the witch doctor
He told me what to do

He said that

Ooo eee,ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla, bing bang
Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla bing bang…
Ooo eee ,ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla ,bing bang
Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla bing bang

The lilliputians

The human race =99.9999999999999 per cent empty space; put another way the entire human species could fit within the volume of a sugar cube. If you  think that’s incredible, go here for a run down of some weird Big Sky facts (or at least some high quality theorems).

Cynicism invades the world of coffee (huh?)

“People who wouldn’t think of going through a morning without a cup of coffee usually think it helps perk them up. But surprising new research suggests that it only helps bring them back to the normal state they’d be in if they didn’t drink any coffee at all…” Read rest of this shocking story here.

Note: I have the sense that certain hidden emails will eventually be “discovered” by a whitleblower from this group of researchers that will cast doubt on the group’s conclusion.

Hyperlinking and memory

“…This evidence — that even the microseconds of decision-making attention demanded by hyperlinks saps cognitive power from the reading process, that multiple sensory inputs severely degrade memory retention, that overloading the limited capacity of our short-term memory hampers our ability to lay down long-term memories — is enough to make you want to run right out and buy Internet-blocking software…” Here.

Space plane: the launch

Hmmmmm……………”Clearly it will do experiments with worm holes. It circles the earth for 9 months gaining speed then leaves and as they said, they don’t know when it will return. Its a first wave on a war for resources from other dimensions. People from another dimension will consider it an attack on their reality and because we sent a ship their way they will know where we are. Its end. The END I AM TELLING YOU!”……………….Hmmmmmm

See  this story here (comments section)

The Alice in Wonderland effect

Professor, I am ready when you are. “…So, think of us as ants living on a sheet of paper, but perhaps there are other parallel sheets of paper with other ants living on them.  And perhaps we are very close to these other universes, but we can’t reach them.  The energy necessary to reach a parallel universe would be the Planck Energy, 10 to the 19 billion electron volts….trillions of years from now, intelligent life, facing the ultimate demise of the universe itself might decide to leave the universe.  To leave our universe and enter a parallel universe in the same way that Alice entered the looking glass to enter Wonderland.”  Here.

Memory, speak

“…[Mr. HM] consented years ago to donate his brain for study, and last February Dr. Jacopo Annese, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of California, San Diego, traveled across the country and flew back with the brain seated next to him on Jet Blue…”

Pseudo science heats up

I’ve never been a steadfast fan of Glenn Beck. Too dramatic for me usually. But when Glenn Beck is good he’s well, good. There’s a lot of stuff he discusses that you won’t see on any other news show. You won’t see it on the suspendered cadaver-looking Larry King Almost Live. Not even Bill O’Reilly dares go where Beck goes. Take, for instance,  the Great Man-Made Global Warming Scam now coming to light:

Drowning puppies and kittens, oh my…

Global warming adverts aim at storytelling, as in…and a pre-warming rabbit weeps real tears as drought sweeps the earth, as the father reads to the daughter. Why o why o daddy dear? Because daughter dear, ” ‘strange weather’ is being caused ‘by too much CO2, which went up into the sky when the grown ups used too much energy’ “… Here.

Baseball, a monkey wrench–and tuna

“…A new book by a former employee of Alcor, the company that froze Ted Williams’ remains, alleges the baseball Hall of Famer’s body was mistreated by the company. Larry Johnson says in the book ‘Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death’ that he watched an Alcor official swing a monkey wrench at Williams’ frozen severed head to try to remove a tuna can stuck to it. The first swing accidentally struck the head, Johnson contends, and the second knocked the tuna can loose…” Article here.

Resolved: NOT all women are totally and completely and absolutely evil

“…Women: do you have a man? If you do, better beware. Chances are that some lone female has her eye on him. A new study provides evidence for what many have long suspected: that single women are much keener on pursuing a man who’s already taken than a singleton. “The single women really, really liked the guy when he was taken,” says Melissa Burkley of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, who conducted the “mate-poaching” study with her colleague Jessica Parker…” Article here in “New Scientist.”

“The Greatest Show on Earth”

The Epilson-Minus Semi-Moron IQ Test

Eplison-Minus Semi-Moron test is based on the intelligence parameters developed by British writer Aldous Huxley in London during the 1930s.

Lie machines

Interestingly, on Part 2, a body language “expert” has fairly good  results with lie detection (although, unlike in part 1, the subjects were not taught to mask their lies)

Michael Shermer is the editor of Skeptic magazine and has numerous debunking videos on his Youtube channel.

Where no man has gone before

“There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going. It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever…” Read story here.

Note: One of the questions I have is, did our own banana republic also have a secret space program?

Corrupt corporations, corrupt lawyers, corrupt judges and corrupt food

Hurry, spit out that corn. The future of food

Nye says nay to big night light in the sky

Sayeth Genesis 1:16: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day [sun] and the lesser light [moon] to govern the night.”  Evidently the notion that the moon exudes its own light was severely put to the test when Bill Nye The Science Guy called that illuminated orb a mere reflector of the sun’s rays. It seems some in medieval Waco, Texas, however,  consider this sort of view highly ungodly, evideneced by the rush to the lecture hall’s exit doors. Time to pass the Kool Aid.

Keep your eyes on the second hand…

“Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago… There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.” Read more about time here.

Life as seen from the tenth dimension

This confirms what I always suspected: there is nothing easy about being on the cutting edge of physics even though a theory–in this case the tenth dimension–is contained in an eleven minute video. It’s based on a book by Rob Bryanton called Imagining the Tenth Dimension. He also has a blog by the same name.

Killing a coat with your bare hands (or at least by pulling the plug or turning off the juice or something like that)

“I felt cruel when I turned it off…” Understandable. I mean the damn coat was alive and growing at an alarming rate, even though one of the sleeves had fallen off.

“One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is…” Read rest of article.

NOTE: “unsettlingly alive”–Gees that gives my stomach the squirms.

Will all the world’s content fit in an iPod by 2020?

It will probably be the case, says Google’s Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. “…if this trend continues, and the cost of storage continues to decrease, we estimate that somewhere around 2020, all the world’s content will fit inside an iPod, and all the world’s music would sit in your palm as early as 2015…” Can you imagine the bill you’d get from iTunes for all that stuff? I have a feeling it’s going to be way out of my league.

Halloween subject: Final moments

Once when I was a kid I lay in bed wondering what it would be like to be dead. What would it feel like? I stiffened up under the blanket. I put my hands at my side and closed my eyes. I stopped breathing for a full twenty seconds or so. I tried not to think about anything. I suppressed all thoughts of naked women (as best I could). That was my simulation. That was what I imagined death would be like. At New Scientist there’s an article entitled Death special: How does it feel to die? “Is it distressing to experience consciousness slipping away or something people can accept with equanimity? Are there any surprises in store as our existence draws to a close? These are questions that have plagued philosophers and scientists for centuries, and chances are you’ve pondered them too occasionally.” The article gives us descriptions–simulations–of drowning, heart attack, bleeding to death, fire, decapitation, electrocution, falling, hanging, lethal injection, explosive decompression. Turns out my own simulation wasn’t even close. Check here too.

Beheading:

“Beheading, if somewhat gruesome, can be one of the quickest and least painful ways to die – so long as the executioner is skilled, his blade sharp, and the condemned sits still. The height of decapitation technology is, of course, the guillotine. Officially adopted by the French government in 1792, it was seen as more humane than other methods of execution. When the guillotine was first used in public, onlookers were reportedly aghast at the speed of death. Quick it may be, but consciousness is nevertheless believed to continue after the spinal chord is severed. A study in rats in 1991 found that it takes 2.7 seconds for the brain to consume the oxygen from the blood in the head; the equivalent figure for humans has been calculated at 7 seconds. Some macabre historical reports from post-revolutionary France cited movements of the eyes and mouth for 15 to 30 seconds after the blade struck, although these may have been post-mortem twitches and reflexes. If you end up losing your head, but aren’t lucky enough to fall under the guillotine, or even a very sharp, well-wielded blade, the time of conscious awareness of pain may be much longer. It took the axeman three attempts to sever the head of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587. He had to finish the job with a knife.Decades earlier in 1541, Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, was executed at the Tower of London. She was dragged to the block, but refused to lay her head down. The inexperienced axe man made a gash in her shoulder rather than her neck. According to some reports, she leapt from the block and was chased by the executioner, who struck 11 times before she died.”

Printed references:

What Happens When We Die?

Mortal Lessons

The Executioner Always Chops Twice